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Re: Documentation Standards was Re: [ox-en] UserLinux



On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 11:48:16AM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Martin Hardie wrote:
Beni for my part I was responidng to Niall's comment which I found
quite interesting from the point of view of seeing the FLOSS
community or that part of it inhabited by the devleopes as a techno
elite.

Ah! The "Hacker Republic" problem. i.e., through free software
development, we can redefine and "democratize" the way we, work,
communicate, interact, govern, etc. but this type of democracy is only
available to those who know how to hack the code! More simply:
everyone may but not everyone can. This thread has already threshed
this out quite a bit since I started writing this email yesterday.

For soemone like em having the source code is next to useless. What
I need is knowledge.  So as someone who has started using FLOSS in
the last year or so and is not a techie I soemtimes find
instructions and even books (eg Running Linux) a little bit
difficult.

I think you're conflating things. This is a different (but no less
important) problem. This is the "GNU/Linux is too hard" problem.

This second problem is easier to deal with. FOSS *will* get easier to
use. Linux was announced only 12 years ago and we've made leaps and
bounds since then. A decade ago, I used an operating system without a
graphical user interface. In the proprietary world, Windows 3.1 was in
use and Windows 95 was just around the corner. We've come a long way
in terms catching up in the last decade and users without a lot of
technical uses are able to use GNU/Linux for a limited set of
things. As time progresses, this set of things will increase. We've
got KDE, GNOME, Nautalis, Evolution, Mozilla, Konquerer, Openoffice,
and the number is increasing.

The "the only intuitive interface is a nipple" problem (sorry for
naming all these problem) will remain. People who are good at an
operating system and want to switch will have learn a new one. As
innovators and creative people, we (developers) can't, and don't want
to, mimic existing OS's perfectly. However, I think fixing the the the
"too hard" problem (paired with good documentation) well will make
this one go away, .

The hacker republic problem is tricky. Guido von Rossum has said that
*everyone* who uses a computer should learn a programming language. I
used to think that was totally off base but over time I've come to
reflect on how much better the computer using world would be if this
were the case. :)

What we need to do first is figure out if software is more like
reading (the idea of teaching a society to read but *not* to write is
horrifying) or more like building a car (not everyone needs to know
how to build a car although even though it might be nice).

I think my position is shaping up to be that a three-pronged approach
is the best solution:

 - Guido is right. If computers and software are going to be as
   pervasive and central in the next generation as we think, our 8th
   graders (hell, kindergartners) *must* learn programming. In the
   west, they probably already do. :)

 - If the bit above is going to work, we need to make programming
   easier and more accessible. Good news is that this is already
   happening. Prolog is more accessible than PHP is more accessible
   than Perl is more accessible than C is more accessible than
   Fortran.

 - FOSS! Once we all have languages that make programming easy and the
   knowledge to use these languages we need to make we can use them to
   change the world around us. The knowledge alone is the first half
   but the ability must be there as well and FOSS, and copyleft in
   particular, is the way we ensure this freedom.

Thus I get something like this below and my eyes just glaze over and
even to do soemthing like this I need a guru to help me rather than
just ahving some plug and play.

This is clearly not documentation written for a beginner.

You're right. Perhaps once you figured out how to get your printer set
up (perhaps with the help of a guru) you could document the process
and upload the doc to a local use group with a google-indexed archive
or, even better, stick it on a webpage. :) Even beginners can give
back to the communities they're working with and if it's going to get
easier for the next group of beginners, they *need* to.

Regards,
Mako

-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako debian.org
http://mako.yukidoke.org/



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